Tech Clinic

My mail email account is a Hotmail address, and I’ve set it up so that spam messages are automatically redirected into my junk folder. Until recently I could block these unwanted mails by selecting them (never opening), clicking Spam and then Block. Now it’s asking me to “view blocked senders” and add blocked domains to a list. Why can I no longer just block these unwanted mails? Gary, Wigan

Many spammers have many hundreds of email addresses at their disposal, meaning blocking individual addresses can be not only time-consuming, but effectively useless.

You may want to adjust the sensitivity of your junk email filter to ensure it’s winkling out more of the kind of messages you don’t want to be subject to.

Open up your Hotmail account, click Home > Delete group > Junk > Junk E-mail Options. Here you’ll be given the option to change your level of protection. By default, Hotmail is set to no automatic filtering, so you may want to change your protection to High, which should do a better job of catching the spam.

If you’re fed up of deleting the messages in your Junk folder, you can easily set it to automatically delete anything suspected as spam. However, you won’t be able to check them before they’re spirited away into the ether. To do this, click Home > Junk > Junk E-mail Options > and tick Permanently delete suspected junk email instead of moving it to the Junk E-mail folder.

The most extreme method of filtering out spam is to turn on the Safe Lists Only option, which only directs messages from address you’ve marked as spam into your inbox and filters everything else into Junk. Obviously, activating this runs the risk of legitimate emails being marked as spam, so you’d need to keep a fairly close eye on your junk folder just in case.

I own a Samsung S8 mobile phone and a two-year old iMac. My internet email server is VirginMedia, which I have one address with. Around four months ago the emails on my mobile started displaying multiple messages in a single email, sometimes three to four within one message. This does not happen on my main computer or on my Gmail address emails on my phone – David, Guisborough

I contacted Virgin to ensure there wasn’t a known problem with how emails were being displayed on Samsung or other Android-running smartphones, but the company said your issue seems to originate from the settings on your device rather than a larger issue with Virgin Media email addresses.

This would explain why it’s displaying differently on your phone to your Mac, and why it’s limited to your Virgin Media email and not your Google account as well.

The Gmail account appears unaffected (Photo: Pixabay)

A Virgin spokesperson recommended you open the Mail app on your Samsung and select your Virgin Media email account. Once you’ve done that, tap on the Menu icon (the cog icon) before selecting Settings and tapping on View.

This should present you with two options. You can either view the emails as a conversation or in standard format. The conversation format will put all the emails from a chain into one message – which appears to be how your account is already set up – whereas the standard format should show them all individually, which is what you’d prefer. Select the standard format to display all messages in an email chain as individual emails.

If this doesn’t solve your problem, for whatever reason, Virgin said it’d recommend posting some screen shots of how the emails are appearing on its Community Forum (https://community.virginmedia.com/). Its staff should be able to offer further assistance there.

I use Photobox to turn digital pictures of my granddaughter into printed photo albums, and recently downloaded Google Chrome because I’d been told it was a good browser. I tried to compose an album having logged on to Photobox and was asked to download Adobe Flash, presumably to run the editing suite. It wouldn’t download, much to my annoyance, so I had to exit and start again using my old Microsoft Edge browser. Any ideas as to why this should happen? — Philip, Kettering

You’re right, Photobox needs Adobe Flash Player running in your browser to access the creation studio for some of its products. While the best web browser for your needs is largely a matter of preference, Chrome is predominantly faster than Microsoft Edge.

Generally, when you open up Photobox in Chrome a notification should pop up asking you to enable Flash.

Click Continue on this before selecting Click to enable Adobe Flash Player. A pop-up should appear inviting you to click Allow – doing this once should be sufficient.

If this pop-up does not appear and only a blank page is displayed, head to the Settings menu in the top right-hand corner of the Chrome window (the icon is three vertical dots). Click on Settings, then Advanced Settings and then select Site settings (if you’re using a computer running Windows), or Content settings (if you’re using a Mac) and click on Flash. On this new page you’re able to select Ask first to allow Flash Player to be run on any website you browse.

What is the best way to delete a Gmail account I no longer use? – Sarah, Wales

While it’s an incredibly obvious thing to say, make sure you’re happy with the notion of never accessing your Gmailemail address ever again before you finally hit delete. While you may be able to get the address back (depending on how unique it is) if you change your mind, your emails and other documents will be lost forever.

Consequently, when it comes to deleting a Gmail account, Google recommends you download any data you may have saved first. Whether or not you’ll want to will depend on if there’s anything worth saving, but if want to, go to https://takeout.google.com/ and select the Google products listed (there may not be any if you haven’t enabled any services for which data can be exported), select Next Step and follow the on-screen instructions.

Once you’ve finished the aforementioned steps or you’re not fussed about saving any data, go to https://myaccount.google.com/ to access your Google account. The following instructions are for if you’re using a computer, but Google also lists detailed information for how to delete accounts using an Android phone, iPhone or iPad online. The following is designed to delete your Gmail address but not your entire Google account, which you’ll still be able to access.

No more unread emails (Photo: Pixabay)

Click the Data & Personalisation tab at the top of the screen , before scrolling down to Download or delete your data. Click Delete a Service. It may ask you to sign in using your Google account, before clicking Delete next to Gmail.

If you’re looking to delete your entire Google account, follow the same steps but select Delete Your Account instead of Delete a Service. This should get rid of your Google account permanently.

I ran into all sorts of difficulties recently when I tried to update my Tomtom Go 610 sat nav. I ended up ringing customer support, and the helpful man explained that the problem lay with the antivirus/firewall built into my Windows 10 laptop. He suggested the easy way to solve the problem was use a Windows 7 computer which I happened to have but was thinking of dumping. He was right, but how do others with just Windows 10 manage? Barry, Overton

I ran your issue past TomTom, who confirmed that the problem is directly related to the security running on the machine, rather than the Windows 10 software.

“There are a few elements which can cause problems depending on how the port configuration, https settings and so on are configured,” they said.

“Changing computers is a viable option but it would not really make a difference which OS [operating system] it’s running. People can always make exceptions in their security protocol but this is outside TomTom’s support boundaries.”

The good news is it should be fairly easy to adjust your firewall’s settings to allow your sat nav’s MyDriveConnect computer program to download and install the software onto your device.

“All the communication (inbound and outbound, local and remote) via the following TCP ports should be allowed,” the spokesperson said, adding that the TCP port was most important.

The main communication port should be configured to 80, HTTPS (required for logins, associations and all kind of encrypted contents) should be configured to 443, Internal communication ports should be configured to 3128, 3129 and the web connector port of MyDrive (to communicate with the browser) should be set to 4000.

Hopefully this is helpful and you’ll be able to connect next time you need to update your software without issue.

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